Hungarian Studies

Between 1848 and 1914, approximately 100,000 Jews emigrated from Hungary to the United States. They came in two waves. The first group, catalyzed by the 1848 revolutions against the Austrian monarchy, consisted mainly of political dissidents and well-educated, cosmopolitan, middle-class Jews seeking greater personal, religious, and political freedoms in the New World. The second and much larger group, which began to arrive around 1880, consisted primarily of poor peasants and unskilled labourers, beckoned to America by the promise of vast economic opportunity.

Describes the hard choices of intellectuals in a totalitarian state.

This work examines six distinct migrant streams that contributed to the formation of Michigan's Hungarian communities. It draws a dynamic picture of cultural retention and change among diverse Hungarian migrants.

"The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were times of change in the United States. The influx of immigrants gave the country a new face as well as a new culture. Often overshadowed by the stories of other immigrant communities, the Hungarian experience is finally brought to the forefront in Julianna Puskas's thorough discussion of life in both Hungary and the United States." "Beginning with a look at the semifeudal state of mid-nineteenth century Hungarian society, the author provides a historical context within which to place Hungarian emigration. Puskas goes on to explain how the immigrants built diverse communities in this country and became Hungarian-Americans, rather than just Hungarians in America. She also chronicles the role of Hungarian-Americans during the Cold War, focusing on the displaced persons who arrived immediately after World War II, and the freedom fighters a decade later. Ties That Bind, Ties That Divide melds a lucid, thorough appraisal of the Hungarian migration with first-hand experiences, interviews, and observations into a vivid picture of the evolution of one of America's many vital ethnic voices."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This book describes and analyzes the critical period of 1711-1848 within Hungary from novel points of view, including close analyses of the proceedings of Hungarian diets. Contrary to conventional interpretations, the study, stressing the strong continuity of traditionalism in Hungarian thought, society, and politics, argues that Hungarian liberalism did not begin to flower in any substantial way until the 1830s and 1840s. Hungarian Culture and Politics in the Habsburg Monarchy also traces and evaluates the complex relationship between Austria and Hungary over this considerable span of time. Past interpretations have, with only a few exceptions, tilted heavily towards the Austrian role within the Monarchy, both because its center was in Vienna and because few non-Hungarian scholars can read Hungarian. This analysis redresses this balance through the use of both Austrian and Hungarian sources, demonstrating the deep cultural differences between the two halves of the Monarchy, which were nevertheless closely linked by economic and administrative ties and by a mutual recognition that co-existence was preferable to any major rupture.

Material culture in Eastern Europe under state socialism is remembered as uniformly gray, shabby, and monotonous--the worst of postwar modernist architecture and design. Politics in Color and Concrete revisits this history by exploring domestic space in Hungary from the 1950s through the 1990s and reconstructs the multi-textured and politicized aesthetics of daily life through the objects, spaces, and colors that made up this lived environment. Krisztina Féherváry shows that contemporary standards of living and ideas about normalcy have roots in late socialist consumer culture and are not merely products of postsocialist transitions or neoliberalism. This engaging study decenters conventional perspectives on consumer capitalism, home ownership, and citizenship in the new Europe.

In Chess Game for Democracy, Mária Palasik examines this ill-fated conflict to explain how it was possible for the parties to work together in a coalition government, while constantly at odds with each other. Her reconstruction of the debates over the introduction of the law to protect the republic against conspiracy and the politics behind the Hungarian Brotherhood show trial are grounded in her pathbreaking research in the archives of the state security agencies. Through the case study of a single country, Chess Game for Democracy makes a major contribution to ongoing debates on the origins of the Cold War in Europe and the process of Sovietization in Central and Eastern Europe, improving our understanding of European history post World War Two and of the reasons for changing relations between the superpowers.

This comprehensive history follows the trajectory of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, including essays from a range of noted scholars and historians and reactions from leading non-Hungarian intellectuals of the time, such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. An appendix reprints the texts of crucial primary sources.

In this book, first published in 1996, Rudolf Tökés offers a comprehensive overview of the rise and fall of the Kadar regime in Hungary between 1957 and 1990. The approach is interdisciplinary, reviewing the regime's record with emphasis on politics, macroeconomic policies, social change and the ideas and personalities of political dissidents and the regime's 'successor generation'. The study provides a fully documented reconstruction of the several phases of the ancien régime's road from economic reform to political collapse, based on interviews with former top party leaders and transcripts of the Party Central Committee. Tökés gives an in-depth account of the personalities and issues involved in Hungary's peaceful transformation from one-party state to parliamentary democracy, and a comprehensive assessment of Hungary's post-Communist politics, economy and society.

This scathing, humorous, and insightful memoir by exiled Hungarian novelist Sandor Marai provides one of the most poignant and humanly alive portraits of life in Hungary between the German occupation and the solidification of communist power."

This book looks at the problems connected with the modernization of a Central European state and its development from a feudal to a civil society. Using the history of Hungary over the last 150 years as a model, the author sheds light on political, social and economic trends in the region as a whole.

Like the renowned American writer Edmund Wilson, who began to learn Hungarian at the age of 65, Richard Teleky started his study of that difficult language as an adult. Unlike Wilson, he is a third-generation Hungarian American with a strong desire to understand how his ethnic background has affected the course of his life. "Exploring my ethnicity," he writes, "became a way of exploring the arbitrary nature of my own life. It was not so much a search for roots as for a way of understanding rootlessness - how I stacked up against another way of being." He writes with clarity, perception, and humor about a subject of importance to many Americans - reconciling their contemporary identity with a heritage from another country. From an examination of photographer Andre Kertesz to a visit to a Hungarian American church in Cleveland, from a consideration of stereotypical treatment of Hungarians in North American fiction and film to a description of the process of translating Hungarian poetry into English, Teleky's interests are wide-ranging. he concludes with an account of his first visit to Hungary at the end of Soviet rule.